The ‘Rectification of Names’ was, as we have seen, one of the long-standing topics of Confucian philosophy. From Confucius, through Mo Di and Mencius, and on to Xunzi, the matching of name to reality was considered to be one of the most important matters in administering a state. Its level of importance can be judged by the fact that there was a group of philosophers whose attention was focused on the matter of naming, who are collectively referred to as ‘the School of Names’ – although another name which was applied to them is ‘the Arguers’.
The School of Names frequently expressed its thoughts by using paradoxical statements which showed how necessary it was not only to know the relationship between a name and the corresponding reality, but also to appreciate how context was vital in determining what a sentence meant. For example, Hui Shi (c. 350–260 BCE) is quoted in the Zhuangzi as saying such things as, ‘The sky is as low as the earth; the mountains are on the same level as marshes’, by which he meant that in each case the impression you get depends on where you are standing in relation to the two things: the sky, however high it may extend, meets the earth at the horizon, and marshes may be found in the upper reaches of mountains.
Hui Shi also extended his approach to more abstract concepts, saying for example that ‘the greatest has nothing beyond itself and is called “Great One”. The smallest has nothing within it and is called “Small one”.’ These postulates are intended to set maximum and minimum limits to the conceptual understanding of the physical world irrespective of the size of any particular thing in the world, and in so doing introduce the concept that there must be both something ultimately large and something ultimately small.
Perhaps the best-known philosopher of the School of Names was Gong-sun Long, the author of a book bearing his name and containing one of the most famous paradoxes of all time. This is the ‘White Horse’ debate, and it is very interesting in the light it casts on Chinese language and its writing system, since precision of language and its implications for philosophy and legal systems were of great importance to the Chinese themselves. The White Horse debate, which is written as if taking place between two people, begins:
A white horse is not a horse; what’s your view about that?
Unfortunately, when Western scholars first tried to understand Gong-sun Long’s arguments, they noted that the School of Names was roughly contemporary with the Greek philosophers who discussed logic in terms of paradoxes, and assumed that the School of Names was involved in similar arguments. From this basis they found great difficulty in understanding what Gong-sun Long was trying to demonstrate, for the debate seems to be taking place between the first speaker, who supports his assertion that a white horse is not a horse, and a second speaker who clearly thinks that the horses he encounters are still horses, whatever their colour. The misunderstanding reached its height when one Western scholar proposed that the problem arose because an ancient Chinese book of Gong-sun Long’s works, made up from bamboo strips laced together, had come untied and been reassembled in the wrong order. However, remembering that Chinese was written in ideographic characters, each of which conveyed a chunk of meaning, the traditional text makes perfect sense as a debate between one speaker who is looking at the physical world and another speaker who is dealing with how that world is to be represented in writing. Following the introductory statement, the debate runs as follows:
Gong-sun Long: I think that’s allowable.
A.N. Other: How come?
Gong-sun Long: We use “horse” [the character 
, ma] to name the form, and we use “white” [the character 
, bai] to name the colour; the naming of a form is not the naming of a colour. That’s why I say, “a white horse is not a horse”.
A.N. Other: Suppose there is a white horse, then you cannot say that there is no horse. How can the fact that you cannot say that there is no horse allow you to say that the white horse is not a horse? The existence of a white horse implies that there is a horse – a white one. How can it not be a horse?
Gong-sun Long: If you are looking for a horse, chestnut and black horses both fill the bill. If you are looking for a white horse, chestnut and black horses don’t fill the bill. Suppose a white horse were a horse. In this case what you are looking for is identical, and this being so a white horse is no different from a horse. Because what you are looking for is not different, as if chestnut and black horses are simultaneously allowed and not allowed, what follows? Possibility coexists with impossibility, a coexistence which is mutually exclusive. So the fact that a white horse is not a horse is proved in detail.
A.N. Other: If you argue that the fact that a horse has a colour means that it is not a horse, then since the world can’t contain a horse which has no colour, is it correct to say that there are no horses in the world?
Gong-sun Long: Horses definitely have colours. Therefore there are white horses. Suppose that a horse had no colour, then you would simply have “horse” per se. How could that give you a white horse? Therefore the whiteness is not the horse. A white horse is “horse-ness” plus “white-ness”. But if you propose “horse-ness” plus “white-horse-ness”, I say that “white horse” is not “horse”.
By this point in the debate it has become clear that what Gong-sun Long is talking about is the use of the ideographs (bai – ‘white’) and (ma – ‘horse’) rather than any actual white horse. This conclusion is reinforced by another of his debates, this time about ‘pointers’ and ‘things’. Although it has been suggested that the reference to a pointer corresponds to the ancient Greek philosophical concept of the ‘form’ of a thing, in the context of Gong-sun Long’s debates it seems more direct to think in terms of the scope of meaning of a Chinese character, which obviously embraces ‘things’ in the real world, and the use of the character as a label which identifies – or points to – that scope. A simple diagram will serve to show how this makes sense of Gong-sun Long’s argument.
In the diagram, the character bai points to the area whose scope is ‘white-ness’, and the character ma points to the area whose scope is ‘horse-ness’. For convenience, each area is visualised as a circle, and it is the area that is specific to the respective character. The area which accommodates things that have both horse-ness and white-ness is clearly not a circle, but has a lenticular shape. The scope of this area, which encompasses white horses, is clearly not the same as the ‘horse-ness’ circle, nor indeed of the ‘white-ness’ circle, so in terms of the way in which Chinese characters represent reality, Gong-sun Long is clearly correct in saying that ‘white horse’ (the lenticular shape) is not the same as ‘horse’ (the right-hand circle).
Some of Gong-sun Long’s other debates – for example, the one which explores the statement that a stone cannot be both hard and white – can also be understood on a similar basis, but extended to consider cases where the areas pointed to by three characters overlap. So, one of the topics of interest to the School of Names was how to ensure correct use of Chinese characters to represent reality.
This account of the underlying reasoning in Gong-sun Long’s debates is of more than purely linguistic interest. Remembering that Xün Kuang reserved the control of names (and therefore the use of language) to the ruler, it might at first sight seem unlikely that he would disagree with the philosophers of the School of Names, but he was particularly worried by the arguments of Hui Shi, who used his rhetorical skills to undermine common-sense notions of things – for example, in the paradox of the relative heights of mountains and swamps. For Xün, this was literally playing with words, depriving them of their proper meanings. In particular, he was afraid that the use by lawyers of School of Names arguments would bring about unjust results in litigation, defeating the purposes of the ruler in administering the state.
Nevertheless, the principles developed by the philosophers of the School of Names would form part of the platform from which the subsequent philosophy of Legalism would spring. As the various Warring States were amalgamated by conquest and treaty, the geographical areas to be controlled from the centre were becoming larger, and it became more important to develop administrative systems that depended on documents rather than word of mouth. The success of this development over the centuries is clear from the fact that it was eventually capable of supporting administration over such distances that the recipients of the centrally issued edicts were able to read and understand them, even though they spoke mutually incomprehensible dialects of Chinese. The key to this success was the nature of the Chinese characters, which, as we have seen, were pointers to areas of meaning. It was vital for the system to work that the respective area of meaning to which each character pointed was understood by all, and we can see in this the reasoning behind Xün Kuang’s condemnation of the unilateral coining of names, which he felt would cause confusion in relation to regular names and so cause deception of the populace.
Despite Xün Kuang’s opposition to the School of Names, Gong-sun Long’s contribution to the subject was to explore exactly how the Chinese character writing system worked, and so to make it possible to use the characters to define information accurately. This would clearly aid in the framing of clear regulations, which in turn would promote good administration. The framing of regulations, however, was about to be wrested from the hands of the Confucian sages and seized by a new school – the so-called Legalists.